Black Cross

A New Contact, and Trail's End

With the trail of the two metahumans cooling rapidly, the heroes decided to try another lead. (Dr. Blackwell had been called away to help at the New Seattle campus of the Institute of Technology and Design, leaving the three remaining heroes without an intellectual.)

One of the intended recipients for the stolen goods was a fence in Denver. He operated a legitimate business (if only as a front) and so following the lead would require tact and finesse. Fortunately, our party of heroes have tact and finesse in bucketloads. Lars put together a fictional order for supplies, including some hard-to-come-by pieces that had been in the lost shipments. The contact requested a week’s time to meet the order, and so Briggs turned into a puff of air and hung around the place like a really bad fart, to surreptitiously keep an eye on things. Yuvi took a delivery to Canada. Lars ordered some new parts for his suit and made the contact think of him as a legitimate customer.

The delivery of the stolen goods was made by a man with a suit and briefcase. The parts were verified as those stolen, and the contact decided to keep things quiet in the interest of maintaining his life. He spilled the news: he fenced for the Syndicate, a huge underground organization, in addition to his legitimate retail work. He didn’t know where the goods had come from originally.

In the process of following up on this new lead, Briggs got a hint from a different suited man that the contact “had been dealt with” and that the party of heroes would best avoid further involvement. The heroes managed to prevent their contact from opening a second, booby-trapped briefcase; a spectrometer was unable to identify its contents through the seals, and so the contact shot a hole in the briefcase from across the room to see what would happen. The back wall of his shop melted.

The contact defected to Eisenjaeger for continued protection, and, granted his information on the Syndicate, they decided to keep him safe. One of the leads that he was able to provide, combined with Eisenjaeger intelligence and resources, gave a warehouse outside of town as the location for a trade between the Syndicate and some of its independent contractors. At the warehouse, our three heroes found five powersuits and their pilots, and two familiar metahumans.

The battle did not go well for the bad guys. Three of the five pilots wound up dead, one terrified and one stuck in a powerless suit. As for the metahumans, the woman was crushed beneath a crate of weapons thrown by Briggs, even though, at the time, she was trying to flee without taking any of the goods involved in the transaction and was not presenting a threat to anyone. The man witnessed this brutality, and stopped fighting entirely to try to rescue her, and in return had most of his bones shattered – again, by Briggs. Foreshadowing.

Following the Trail

Setting out to track down the two metahumans, Dr. Blackwell’s expertise with technology and his access codes for Eisenjaeger’s satellite network allowed our heroes to track the two metahumans to a hotel. Briggs’ unusual skill set allowed him to follow their lead through the building, and into an underground sewer access – during which process Briggs revealed himself to be a mutant of bizarre form, able to take on the characteristics of inanimate matter, such as water or steel.

Following the trail through the underground tunnel system, the heroes eventually found an office – boobytrapped, with a note signed “R & R”. The trap was an explosive, connected to a radio transmitter and sitting atop large jugs of powerful acid; if the trap had gone off, they would all have been seriously injured (if not killed) by the blast, and then disfigured or even eaten away entirely by the acid. The radio transmitter was sending only a carrier wave, and would have been silenced by the trap – something easily traced from the receiving end, with zero chance for tracing the other way around. Of course, in the process of disarming the trap, the transmitter was also deactivated… so a listener would know for sure that the trap had been found, but not if it had been successful.

Joining Forces

(Post written long after the fact. Details may vary.)

Yuvi and Lars returned the stolen goods to Eisenjaeger in Denver. Dr. Blackwell, a brilliant scientist, was there as well to deliver his report on something very sciencey and high-tech, and Briggs, a bodyguard for some of the Eisenjaeger bigwigs, was there as well. As the deliveries were being made on the Eisenjaeger rooftop helipad, however, another airtruck appeared – and opened fire.

During the ensuing fight, the bigwig safely retreated to the interior of the tower, and the gunmen were fought back: Lars used his suit to drain the structural integrity of the enemy airtruck, resulting on some very cool special effects and a hail of machinery onto the innocent civilians in the street, forty-four floors below. Two metahumans, however, had been leading participated in the fight. One, a mid-twenties male, shouted loudly enough to stun and injure his opponents, and the other, a mid-twenties female, somehow interfered with the senses of her enemies to confuse them and conceal her allies. As the fight turned against them – the woman was knocked unconscious by a mysteriously-strong Briggs – they fled by jumping over the edge of the tower.

Lars followed to catch them and keep them from a splattery death, and managed to do so, but on landing, the two metahumans showed another power: they stunned him with a touch, leaving a disintegrated handprint in his chestpiece.

The four player characters, handily gathered, were then assigned a mission from Eisenjaeger’s biggest bigwig in North America, Mr. Bikveigg: track down those two metahumans, find out what was going on, and stop the problem at its source.

Duo - Yuvi and Lars

Lars received an assignment from his superiors to investigate a missing shipment. The airtruck delivering it had not arrived at its destination; the best lead available was that the truck with the shipment had been last seen at a fueling station near the Canadian border. The trail then led to Yuvi, as she had been the last person to interact with the pilot of the missing chopper. Lars found her quickly, hired her on to help carry the shipment if it could be found, and continued northward.

They were approached by a Canadian police flight: two trucks and a cruiser. They landed to discuss the situation and their goal; the police had recovered some salvage from a crash, and were still carrying it. Lars was able to identify the goods as those missing, but found a gun to his back. The police were moonlighting as pirates, themselves.

In a brutal fight, Lars shrugged off a bullet to the chest only to be dropped by another, and then recovered heroically. Yuvi managed to restrict her own part of the carnage so that no survivor had seen her change forms, although the sudden fortuitous presence of a giant vicious sabertooth was noteworthy. The lone survivor of the police force confessed to the ongoing moonlighting of his squad, and gave the name of the buyer of their ill-gotten goods: Rodney Keeper, a representative of “The Syndicate.” The dirty cop was relieved of his badge, weapon, and some of his clothing, and sent south to America on foot with the warning that if he were ever seen in Canada again, Lars would hear of it. Having retrieved the goods as requested and uncovered the means by which they were lost, Lars and Yuvi proceeded back to Denver to check in at Eisenjaeger’s North America HQ.

Solo - Yuvi

Yuvi was delivering a shipment of farm equipment to a commune in the Canadian wilderness when she was intercepted by two choppers flown by a crew of pirates. Using her wits and her airtruck’s tie cables, she managed to destroy one chopper completely before the other harpooned her truck. After some taunts, she changed to her cat form and leaped the distance between the flying helicopters, brutally killing the two remaining armed pirates. The final survivor, the pilot of the second chopper, was spared on the condition that he give up piracy and start a new life as a freelance pilot – after all, he had the skills and a bird already, didn’t he? Yuvi then finished her delivery, received payment from the grateful commune, and returned towards home.